A 51-year-old Nigerian man, Tonny Iheoma Ezeh, has been sentenced to nine years and three months in a UK prison for using elderly men to smuggle drugs without their knowledge.
Ezeh, who holds Nigerian, Canadian, and Jamaican passports, tricked an 80-year-old man and a 67-year-old German man by telling them they were about to receive large sums of money as an inheritance.
According to the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), Ezeh made the men travel to Mexico to collect the fake inheritance, then gave them boxes of sweets containing methamphetamine and asked them to deliver the boxes to Hong Kong, via London.
Both men were arrested at Heathrow Airport in October 2023, carrying around three kilograms of meth each. At first, police charged them with drug smuggling. However, the charges were later dropped after investigators found they were innocent and had been deceived by Ezeh.
“He and his crime group singled out and took advantage of elderly, vulnerable victims. He didn’t care at all about the trauma the men would experience when stopped, arrested and remanded in a foreign land,” said NCA Operations Manager Peter Jones.
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Ezeh was later arrested when he entered the UK on December 23, 2023. Data from his phone revealed links to a West African criminal gang that smuggles drugs using passengers and parcel shipments.
The gang reportedly used email scams to trick people into believing they had inherited millions. The victims were then sent to Mexico, made to sign fake documents, and given boxes of chocolates filled with drugs.
The NCA has warned people to be cautious. Jones said, “If an offer is too good to be true, it very likely is. We urge anyone who is approached and asked to transport goods to think very carefully.”
This case is the second time in a year that a Nigerian has been jailed in the UK for drug trafficking. In December 2024, 41-year-old Damilola Ogundeyin was sentenced for helping run a major cocaine trafficking operation in 2022.